Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Nope! This isn't the Olympics...this is having fun photographing bowling!

I have photographed many different sports over the last 10 years but never once had the opportunity to photograph an event at a bowling alley. I was shooting images for a corporate team building event and had a blast capturing these shots.

I started shooting the standard images from behind the bowlers but wanted to try something more fun, so I moved to the front of the lanes and shot back at the participants.

I purposely shot the images at 1/25 of a second so that I would get some motion in the images. I knew that the flash would freeze my main subject, but this still gave me enough motion blur to separate the bowler from the background.

The teams were very competitive and I wanted to show that in my images. I shot this image of my friend Lauren (who was about to bowl) with two of her teammates watching intently behind her.

I created a slide show of all of these images to run before the meetings the following morning and everyone loved the shots.

You might be wondering how I got this shot of Ricardo bowling. Would I be dumb enough to stand in front of him while he hurled a 15 pound bowling bowl between my legs? Yep, that is exactly what I did! (I did remind him that I like my feet and legs and to be very careful in his form).